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Orthodox Church in Eritrea, in the Beginning of the 20Th Century

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Orthodox Church in Eritrea, in the Beginning of the 20Th Century REGNUM STUDIES IN GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY ORTHODOX HANDBOOK ON ECUMENISM Resources for Theological Education “That they all may be one” (John 17:21) Editors Pantelis Kalaitzidis Thomas FitzGerald Cyril Hovorun Aikaterini Pekridou Nikolaos Asproulis Guy Liagre Dietrich Werner REGNUM BOOKS INTERNATIONAL, OXFORD (in cooperation with WCC Publications), Oxford, 2014 (92) ECUMENICAL DIALOGUE IN THE ERITREAN ORTHODOX TEWAHEDO CHURCH Stanislau Paulau Introduction The Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church is the youngest member of the Oriental Orthodox Church family, and it would not be an exaggeration to assert that it is also one of the least known Orthodox Churches worldwide. Although the Eritrean Orthodox Church was established only in the course of the last decade of the 20th century, it shares (together with the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church) a heritage of a centuries-old tradition which goes back to the times of Late Antiquity. This young and simultaneously ancient Church is just making its fi rst steps within the institutionalized ecumenical movement, but the interaction with other Christian denominations has already played a constitutive role in its formation. Modern Eritrea is located along the south-western coast of the Red Sea, an area which once used to be the site of the ancient Kingdom of Aksum extending across the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula and beyond to the Gulf of Aden. Being a major player in the trade between the Roman Empire and Ancient India, China and Persia, the kingdom fl ourished from the 1st to the 7th century and attracted merchants and settlers from through- out the ancient world. It is therefore natural that the cosmopolite Kingdom of Aksum from the earliest times also had a number of Christians, but they were fi rst of all foreigners and lived predominantly in the port city of Adulis. During the reign of Ezana (ca. 325–365), whose religious policy can be seen as an imitatio imperii Romani, the conversion of the kingdom to Christianity took place and was inaugurated by the ordination of its fi rst bishop – St. Frumentius, a Syrian from Tyre, who is revered in Eritrea and Ethiopia as the ‘Revealer of Light’. Thereby a long-standing ecclesiastic bond between the newly founded Church and the Holy See of St. Mark (the Coptic Orthodox Church) was established. The Other as a Challenge: Early Contacts with the Western Christianity “Encompassed on all sides by enemies of their religion, the Ethiopians slept for near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten.”1 This famous passage of the British historian Edward Gibbon transmits an idea which still dominates in the contemporary historiography – the idea that, since the rise of Islam in the neighbouring regions, Ethiopia (including Eritrea) was totally isolated from the wider world and the rest of Christianity throughout the centuries.2 But as the new fi ndings indicate, the Christians in the Horn of Africa were engaged in a rather active interaction with the Christian oikumene long before the advent of the Jesuit mission in the 16th century.3 But in what follows we would like to focus on the interactions between the Orthodox Christians in Eritrea and the representatives of other Christian traditions in more recent times – close before and after the birth of the modern ecumenical movement. 1 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (New York, 1910), 176. 2 For a critique of the contemporary historiographical discourse on the interaction between Ethiopia and the Western world see: Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, “Europe and Ethiopia’s Isolation: the Ethio-Jesuit Paradigm Revised (17th cent.),” in Ludwig Gerhardt (Ed.), Umbrüche in afrikanischen Gesellschaften und ihre Bewältigung, (Berlin, 2006), 223 –233. 3 For the sources and literature on this mission see: Leonardo Cohen Shabot – Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, “The Jesuit Mission to Ethiopia (16th–17th centuries). An Analytical Bibliography,” in Aethiopica: International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies 9 (2006): 190–212. A historical overview of the Ethio-European contacts in the Middle Ages can be found in: Wilhelm Baum, Äthiopien und der Westen im Mittelalter: die Selbstbehauptung der christlichen Kultur am oberen Nil zwischen dem islamischen Orient und dem europäischen Kolonialismus, (Klagenfurt, 2001). 598 Chapter (92) If an active interaction of Christians in Eritrea with the Catholic Church was established already in the Middle Ages, the fi rst encounter with Protestantism happened fi rst in the 19th century.4 And this encounter was rather the result of a misfortune of Swedish Lutheran missionaries who came into the Eritrean city of Massawa in 1866 looking for a way to reach the land of the Oromo people, who were believed still to be “pagans”.5 But as they were successful neither in this undertaking, nor in the attempt to start a mission among Kunama and Barya in the north-west Ethiopia, they found no better idea than to propagate Lutheranism in Orthodox areas of Eritrea.6 This inevitably led not just to an encounter, but to a certain clash between both traditions. Protestant proselytism among its members prompted the Orthodox Church to initiate a discussion with the missionaries and to give a theological response to this challenge. Luckily enough, some Eritrean manuscripts have preserved echoes of these theological debates, whereby we have at our disposal not only a missionary perspective on the situation documented in their reports and diaries, but also – what is extremely rare – an indigenous African view on a Western mission. These manuscripts were composed by the monks of the Debre Bizen monastery, one of the main spiritual and educational centers of the Orthodox Church in Eritrea, in the beginning of the 20th century. The most important work is entitled The Book of Wisdom and is composed in the form of a dialogue between an Orthodox and a Protestant, discussing variety of theological issues, both theoretical and practical (here the question concerning fasting played an important role).7 Nevertheless, this manuscript presenting an outstanding example of the Orthodox apologetic literature and an important document of the early Orthodox-Protestant dialogue is still awaiting its publication and a detailed analysis. However important the dialogue with the Protestants might have been, the interaction with the Catholic Church received much more attention from the side of the Orthodox Eritreans, because from a certain point it exceeded a mere theological framework and became an issue of survival. It had to do with the political transformation of the region. Since the end of the 19th century, Eritrea started taking its modern shape in par- ticularly through a series of small scale expansionist activities of Italy. As the culmination of this process the Italians declared the occupied territory to be its new colony, which they called with the word derived from the Latin name of the Red Sea – Mare Eritreum – ‘Eritrea’.8 The time of the Italian occupation (1890–1941) had not only a tremendous impact on all spheres of life, but played also a major role in the process of the Eritrean 4 For general information on the political background to the missionary initiatives and their consequences in the 19th century see: Donald Crummey, Priests and Politicians: Protestant and Catholic Missions in Orthodox Ethiopia (1830–1868), (Oxford, 1972). For the perspective of the fi rst Protestant missionaries on the Ethiopian Church tradition see: Stanislau Paulau, “Encountering the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the Pre-Ecumenical Age: First Protestant Missionaries in Ethiopia (1829–1843),” in E. Ficquet and A. Hassen (eds.), Movements in Ethiopia, Ethiopia in Movement. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, (Addis Ababa: CFEE – IES, 2014). Forthcoming. 5 For an overview of the history of the Evangelical Church in Eritrea see: Karl Johan Lundström – Ezra Gebremedhin, Kenisha: The Roots and Development of the Evangelical Church of Eritrea 1866–1935, (Trenton: The Red Sea Press, 2011). For the history of the educational work of the Swedish mission in Eritrea see: Jonas Iwarsson – Alberto Tron, Notizie storiche e varie sulla missione evangelica svedese dell’Eritrea, 1866–1916, (Asmara, 1918). 6 Sven Rubenson, The Survival of Ethiopian Independence, (London, 1976), 288–289; Gustav Arén, Evangelical Pioneers in Ethiopia, (Stockholm, 1978), 127–148. 7 EMML [Ethiopian Manuscript Microfi lm Library] 1233, Ff. 5a–24b and ff. 29a–89b. The book was composed in 1905 E.C. (= 1912–1913 A.D.). The same manuscript contains also a report of a dialogue that took place on Maggbit 18, 1902 E.C. (= March 27, 1910 A.D.) between an Orthodox called Tasf ells and the Protestant Abb Mso, see: EMML 1233, Ff. 89b–96b. For the description of the manuscript see: Getatchew Haile (ed.), A Catalogue of Ethiopian Manuscripts Microfi lmed for the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfi lm Library, Addis Ababa and for the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, Collegeville. Vol. 4: Project numbers 1101–1500, (Collegeville: Hill Monastic Ms. Libr., St. John’s Abbey and Univ., 1979), 217. 8 See: Haggai Erlich, “Pre-Colonial Eritrea”, in Siegbert Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Volume 2, D–Ha, (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005), 358–359. Orthodox Handbook on Ecumenism Bishop Demetrios Charbak 599 nation-building.9 Obviously, the ecclesiastic landscape of the country under the new ruler could not remain the same – the Catholic missions in the region gained the momentum.10 The colonial powers tried to use the Catholic mission as one of the tools in their propaganda of the new policy, connected with Italian national ideology.11 Therefore the French Lazarists who were active in Eritrea prior to Italian colonization were suspected of dis- loyalty to the colonial state on the grounds of their nationality and replaced by the Italian Capuchins in 1894.12 In order to strengthen the Catholic Church a new structure, the Apostolic Prefecture of Eritrea, was established.
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